Chapter Twelve
Kira
The Vice Admiral’sdoor was closed. I could see that it was down the long hallway and walked straight there as her assistant chased me, mumbling bullshit about Niobe being on a very important call.
Whatever. I’d show her a fucking important call. Angh was in the brig? Scheduled for execution?
No. Heads were going to roll and it wasn’t going to be my mate’s. The Vice Admiral’s, if necessary.
When the door wouldn’t open, I cursed a human blue streak, then used my emergency code to override the lock. Rank had its privileges.
“Captain,” the assistant called. “What do you think you are doing? You can’t go in there!”
I turned, my hand on the ion blaster at my hip. I didn’t draw the weapon, but the threat was there. It was real, very fucking real. “Get out of here,” I practically snarled. I definitely had a little beast in me. “This doesn’t concern you.”
The Prillon cadet who had scurried after me took one look into my eyes and backed up with her hands in the air. “All right.” She turned on her heel and stormed back to her desk. “But I’m calling security. Again. I don’t get paid enough for this damn job.”
Now that the lock was disabled, one wave of my palm and the door slid open to reveal…chaos.
The Vice Admiral’s desk was imbedded in the wall, fully one third of it no longer visible as the remaining two legs dangled in the air. The other two had been ripped from the bottom of the desk and scattered in a random pattern on the floor. There were burns from ion blaster fire all over the walls behind the desk and I could just imagine a couple of asshole security guards standing where I stood now, in the doorway, firing at my mate.
Yes. My mate.
He was mine. I was over the bureaucratic bullshit. And seeing the scorch marks proved the powers that be considered the rules more important than anything else. I could only imagine what had set Angh’s beast off to destroy the room—and to require so much fire power to stun him and bring him into control.
And those stupid-ass rules? Angh and I would figure it out for ourselves. If we had to be apart for a few weeks at a time, we’d just have to deal. I wasn’t letting him go. Not unless he didn’t want me anymore. And judging by the sore, still swollen state of my pussy and the whisker burns all over my body, that was not going to be an issue.
My fingers wrapped around the hilt of my blaster as I surveyed the rest of the damage. Overturned chairs. Blood on the floor. God help this bitch if it was Angh’s.
Speaking of…
The Vice Admiral stood in the corner away from the mess, sipping from a small glass, staring out over the grounds through one of her many windows. From the look and smell of it, the liquid in her glass was strong, but clear. Not whiskey, but definitely alcoholic, and I had to wonder if it were her first. Two of the windows were shattered, the web pattern an indication that something rather large, like a Prillon guard, had been thrown into it. The glass—or whatever it was made of—was bulletproof, I knew that much. So whatever had hit them had been big and hard, and held a lot of force.
Good. Hopefully Angh gave as good as he got.
“Is the blood his, Niobe?” I refused to address her in any way other than woman to woman. We’d been on dozens of missions together, saved each other’s lives. I had thought, at the bare minimum, we respected each other. This shit was personal, and she knew it. What she’d done, what had happened here, went far beyond the usual BFF problems.
She took another drink and looked over her shoulder at the bloodstains I had indicated. Her snort of laughter contained no humor. “Gods, no. That Atlan is magnificent, isn’t he? Sent six guards to medical, and that was after they shot him with tranquilizers. Shame to lose him.”
I frowned.
“Lose him? Start talking, Niobe. What the hell happened here? Why is he in the brig? What did you do? He was fine a couple of hours ago.”
“In your bed, you mean.” Her dark brow arched up and I refused to look away from the challenge in her eyes. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know. Angh had ripped the door off my classroom. Obviously, what we meant to each other was more than just…dating.
“Yes. In my bed. He’s mine.” I stepped inside the room and closed the distance between us, until we stood facing one another, the broken window at our side. She was close enough to punch in the face, but I knew just how far I could push her without ending up in the brig myself, so I soothed the beast that seemed to live inside me now by stroking the hilt of my blaster. The slight scent coming from her glass smelled like vodka, a distinctly human drink. How she’d become accustomed to something so remote from Everis was beyond me.
The silence stretched, and she turned away from me to once again stare out over the grounds. Down below, dozens of cadets moved from building to building, talking, laughing, training. This had been my home for years now and I loved it, but I loved Angh more. Home was where he was.
“He’s mine, Niobe. My mate. I don’t care if you approve. I’ll still do my job for the I.C., but you can consider this my resignation from the Academy. If you need me, I’ll be on The Colony from now on.”
“With your mate?”
Duh. “Yes. With Angh.”
“I don’t think so, Kira. It’s too late for that.” She turned her back on me and I bit back a snarl of rage that she could be so callous, so calm. So fucking cold. But then I saw where she was headed. A shelf remained intact in the corner. On the top shelf rested an actual glass bottle of vodka from one of the premier distilleries in Russia and three more shot glasses.
When she didn’t say anything, I took the mating cuffs I had clipped to my belt and held them up. All four of them.